Microsoft has announced that the launch of Halo 4 was the biggest Halo launch in history. The launch was also the biggest video game launch of the year, generating $220 million globally in the first 24 hours. Microsoft says that the game was on track to reach $300 million in global sales during the first week.

With the launch of Halo 4, the Halo franchise has earned over $3.3 billion during its lifetime. The record for the largest number of players in the history of the Halo franchise was also broken with over 4 million players battling during the first five days the game was available. Users spent 31.4 million hours playing Halo 4 cumulatively.

Microsoft says that the total number of hours played across all the games the Halo franchise is over 5 billion.

“We’re thrilled that ‘Halo 4’ has emerged as the biggest U.S. entertainment launch of the year,” said Phil Spencer, corporate vice president of Microsoft Studios. “Thanks to the millions of fans worldwide who helped make this another record-breaking launch for the ‘Halo’ franchise, ‘Halo 4’ is kicking off a strong holiday season and has become the must-have blockbuster experience of the year.”

“Consumer demand and excitement for ‘Halo 4’ is even greater than we anticipated,” said Tony Bartel, GameStop president. “Day-one sales of ‘Halo 4’ make it the biggest ‘Halo’ launch in GameStop history and the biggest game launch on any platform so far this year in our stores.”

Microsoft also took a bit of time to brag about the live-action series Halo 4: Forward Unto Dawn. The series has generated more than 46 million total views to date including 39 million on the Machinima.com YouTube channel alone.

with few exceptions, most games are written for consoles first, then ported out to the PC afterwards. I think the game dev companies understand this and account accordingly regarding expected sales #'s. the PC gaming market isn't anywhere near what it was 15 years ago. It'll never get back to that point either.

How does anyone know any of that when there are no sales aggregates for digital distribution? Developers behind alan wake said they made back their port cost in about two days, and that was at $30 on a port of an old game.

Plus 15 years ago a top selling PC game would rake in about 200,000 units or so. Nowadays you've got blizzard software raking in 10 million.

well if it never gets back to that point, it's because of schmucks who keep buying only console games. the hypocracy of 360 elitists who hate on the wii over "Graphics" is hilarious to a hardcore PC gamer.